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Money Making and Money Giving -- Sightings

Quite soon I'll be giving the first of two stewardship messages, the first of which will be delivered on Halloween! How fitting is that, to talk about giving money on the scariest day of the year? With this season of budget planning and such, it's fitting that Martin Marty speaks to the issues of money, stewardship, prosperity gospels and more. I think you'll find this a good starting point for a discussion.

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Money Making and Money Giving

- Martin E. Marty

Ungodly and godly money making and money giving are key topics while many Christian churches gear up for November as “stewardship month.” As they and others face “budget-setting time,” multiple items netted from the public press and the internet beckon for attention. Several focus on the more gross stories from some black church orbits. Even in the UK they drew notice, for example in a Financial Times story “Churches: Riches in This Life, Salvation in the Next,” on “the huge success of Pentecostalism.”

Shyamantha Asokan, a Financial Times reporter, turned to Nigeria for stories as she visited Lagos’s The Living Faith Church, “The Winners’ Chapel,” which seats 50,000 people in front of a wealth-flaunting pastor whose operation reaches 400 satellite churches. A Methodist teacher-trainer in Lagos speaks not out of envy but with realistic appraisal, “The economic life of the pastor is booming, while the economic life of the country is grinding to a halt.” The members of such churches are “like fickle customers,” says Asokan, always shopping for a church whose “Prosperity Gospel” may yield them a pastor-size fortune.

Meanwhile in the Wall Street Journal DeForest B. Soaries, Jr., a New Jersey Baptist pastor takes on the American expressions of the “Prosperity Gospel.” Not despising the good counsel, indeed, praising that which Non-Prosperity-Gospel black churches offer, he sees the Prosperity version to be a perversion of the Gospel.

One could adduce comparable examples of grossness in practice met by criticism from prophetic pulpits also in non-black churches, but I turn next to a headline in the New York Times, “Onward Christian Moguls.” There Maureen Dowd visits the semi-secular, semi-religious “Get Motivated!” seminar in Washington. It’s being staged in several cities, super-advertised—how can one evade the full-page ads?—wherein titans who need no money are out to make money off people who pay well to learn nothing new. Mike Ditka, Steve Forbes, Rudy Giuliani, Terry Bradshaw, Dan Rather, and, alas! Colin Powell, offer bromides and bumper-sticker slogans, often with religious motifs to back them, or front for them. The story is written with irony and tinged in pathos.

Meanwhile, and you are allowed to cheer up, Forward is running an intelligent, fair, and revealing multiple-part story, in one case contrasting Jewish and Christian money-raising approaches. In the October 1 issue Josh Nathan-Kazis headlines “Synagogues Rarely Mention God in Appeals, Unlike Churches.” Synagogues, he writes, tend to rely on assessments and paying of annual dues, supplemented by appeals less to God and more to the responsibility of being in community. He contrasts this, while not judging either approach, with characteristic Christian appeals of the non-Prosperity Gospel style. This is the “stewardship” approach in mainstream and evangelical Protestantism. Nathan-Kazis quotes Lutheran Pastor Megan Torgerson: “Everything you have is God’s to begin with.” Believers are not to think of money as “mine, mine, mine,” but to “celebrate that this is a gift from God already” and ask “What can I do with it?”

Lisa Miller in Newsweek lauds “Bread for the World,” a largely church-based effort to feed the world, something this prosperous nation does not do well. The numbers of the poor and hungry also grow here. Pastor David Beckman, who heads BFTW, promotes stewardship, but does not shy away from connecting the cause with politics and cooperation with government. Get generous, he is saying, and get real.

teach about how living into the Kingdom means living into community, which means investing in the community's present as well as its future; teach about how being "in community" with others means accepting responsibility for the community's financial welfare;teaching that being a part of a community means that the definition of one's family (for which most would presumably acknowledge financial responsibility) has to expand to include the community.

This requires not "thinking outside of the box" but expanding what we understand the "box" to include.

Don't have to condescend, just have to hold our hand while we grope our way together into the future.

I wasn't going to comment because I know I'm way outside of the mainstream on this.

First off: Of course we need stewardship. We need resources.

Second: I fear I'll sound hurtful. I'm trying not to. I'm just trying to state my heart-felt truth.---I feel respected when people put forth reductionist proposals. For instance, "This is our budget. This is what it goes for. This is what we need or else we will have to cut things".

This makes me feel like you see me as a human being who is capable of looking at a situation and doing the best I can for the community.

I feel disrespected when people give theological reasons for giving. I know that ministers are "supposed" to do this. But I ask, "why"?

Ron Allen and Mary Alice Mulligan have spent years doing research on listening to the listeners of sermons. I can't see why we wouldn't do the same with stewardship drives.

Ministry for me is a second career. I didn't accept the call and go to seminary until I was in my 30's. I say this because I remember what it is like to sit through this.

Since becoming a minister I have done my "duty" and said all the right things in the pulpit. If I leave the hospital, I will have to do it again. But let me be clear. I always felt dirty.

A reductionist view honors the observable fact that I'm trying to manipulate a group to give more for a good cause. People feel honored and respected.

Nice sounding theological claims makes the congregation feel like they are being played (because they are). Please note: This has nothing at all to do with the sincerity of the pastor. That's God's business to discern. The heart is for God alone to judge.--

OK, I said my piece. I know I'm on the outside of the mainstream with this. However, this is my heart-felt truth. Thanks for listening.

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I am a Disciples of Christ pastor, theologian, community activist, historian, teacher. I'm a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary with a M.Div. and a Ph.D. in Historical Theology. I'm the author of a number of books including
Out of the Office: A Theology of Ministry (Energion, 2017), Marriage in Interesting Times (Energion, 2016), and Freedom in Covenant (Wipf and Stock, 2015).